Love Anthony (5 page)

So she would buy him an educational toy recommended by Carlin, his applied-behavioral-analysis therapist, or a new Barney video, or one year she wrapped a can of salt-and-vinegar Pringles. Pringles always made him happy. But the gift he loved the most each year was the card.

When he was four, she bought him the first of countless musical greeting cards. This one was a Hoops & Yoyo. She showed him first. He watched, pretending not to look. She opened the card. A song played and the characters sang. She shut the card. The music and the singing stopped.

To this day, she remembers his face, wondrous and joyful with the unexpected discovery of a new fascination, like when he found light switches. He opened the card. Music. He shut it. No music. Open. Music. Shut. No music. These cards were heaven to Anthony. The same song every time it’s opened, the same music; everything the card did was predictable and entirely under his control.

He’d spend the rest of the day smiling and squealing and flapping his hands as he opened, shut, opened, shut, opened, shut. That’s all he wanted every year. Unlimited time alone with his card. So this is what she and David gave to him.

She wonders how David is doing, if he’s awake yet, realizing the date, thinking about Anthony. She hopes he finds comfort today. Her heart aches thinking this, wishing she could be this to him. But she can’t. Comfort doesn’t exist within her, and she can’t offer what she doesn’t have. He doesn’t have it either. They know this.

Olivia sits on the beach, waiting for sunrise, listening to a gull squawking above her, sounding like laughter. The tide is coming in. With each pulse of waves, she watches as a little more of
Happy Birthday Anthony
washes away, until it’s pulled
into the sea entirely. Wiped clean, as if it never existed. If she still believed in God, she would ask Him to send her birthday note written in sand to her son in heaven. But she doesn’t ask for this. These are only words scratched in sand with her finger, swallowed by the ocean.

In front of her feet, she writes
I love you
and waits. The water comes, steady and sure, pooling and bubbling into each letter. The words wash away, reaching no one.

The fog has started to lift, and the day begins to lighten. The metallic-gray ocean tumbles out in front of her. The lighthouse materializes to her left. The next wave crashes, dissolving into a bed of fizzing foam, and deposits a single white, round rock at her feet. Her heart stalls, then quickens. She squats down, picks up the beautiful, smooth stone, and rolls it inside her hand.

Anthony.

I miss you, my sweet boy.

The sun rises, glowing pink on the horizon over the ocean, the color of petunias, beautiful and full of promise.

CHAPTER 5

B
eth and Petra are sitting in Jill’s living room, waiting for Courtney and Georgia. It’s book club night, but Courtney teaches yoga on Thursday evenings, and her class doesn’t get over until six thirty, so they know she’ll be running a bit late. And Georgia is always late. Jill knows this, but she’s still irritated. She’s holding them in the living room until everyone arrives because she wants the entire group to see the dining room at the same time. She’s imagining a grand entrance.

Beth is growing antsy, too. Petra’s planning on outing her tonight, and Beth is feeling less and less certain about this decision each time Jill sighs. It’s not that she doesn’t want her girlfriends to know that Jimmy’s having an affair and has moved out. She doesn’t want the whole island to know. And they will—Len, the school principal; Patty, the checkout woman at Stop & Shop; Lisa, Beth’s hairdresser; Jessica’s basketball coach.

But Petra’s right. Beth needs to stand tall in her truth, draw strength from the collective love of her friends, and something else. Another platitude from Petra’s pep talk earlier today sounded good at the time. Beth can’t remember it now. Petra
reads a lot of inspirational books. She also reads tarot cards and sees a shaman once a month instead of a regular therapist. A lot of people on the island think Petra’s a little cuckoo. While Beth agrees that Petra can lean a bit eccentric, she also believes Petra possesses an inner wisdom that most people never know, a spiritual center that Beth admires and is drawn to and is certain that she herself lacks.

Plus, honesty, friendship, and New Age mumbo jumbo aside, it’s nothing short of a miracle that Jimmy’s affair isn’t public knowledge already anyway. Beth knows. Petra knows. Jimmy and Angela know that Beth knows, so they’re probably less careful now. Someone from the restaurant must know. And that someone will sooner or later tell someone who will tell Jill or Courtney or Jessica’s basketball coach.

And the girls now know that he’s moved out. Sophie was the first to notice that Dad wasn’t inhabiting any of his usual spots—the bed, the couch, his cigar chair.
Where’s Dad?
turned out to be a harder question to answer than
What’s sex?
or
Have you ever smoked pot?
Beth teetered her way through her answer, purposefully keeping the explanation short and vague (and honest—she doesn’t know exactly where he is either), a vain attempt to protect them from having the kind of father who would cheat on their mother. So the girls know that he’s not living at home, but they don’t know the ugly reason. Yet. Sadly, their father is, in fact, cheating on their mother, and it’s only a matter of time before everyone on Nantucket, including his three beautiful daughters, knows it.

Beth picks up the copy of
Nantucket Life
from Jill’s coffee table and thumbs through it, hoping for distraction while Jill frets about how late it’s getting. Beth agrees. It’s taking too long to get started. She feels like she’s in the waiting room at her dentist’s office, knowing that she needs to get her teeth cleaned and that they’ll look and feel great when she’s done, but the waiting around gives her anxiety and her memory too
much time to play together. She’ll begin to fixate on the anticipated sound of the metal instruments scraping against her teeth, the throbbing soreness in her gums, the shame she feels when the hygienist scolds her for not flossing enough, the taste of latex and blood in her mouth. If she has to wait more than ten minutes for the hygienist to call out her name, it takes every ounce of self-control she possesses not to leave for another six months.

Her hygienist and dentist are going to know that Jimmy is cheating on her.

Beth tries to forget about Jimmy and her dentist and what she and Petra talked about earlier and focus on Jill. She’s telling them a story about Mickey’s latest transplant project. Jill’s husband, Mickey, runs his own construction company. The most incredible jobs he contracts aren’t new construction or elaborate additions, but the moving of existing homes a few critical feet. The historic cottages and mansions positioned on the cliffs in ’Sconset are all in imminent danger of tumbling over with the eroding edge, as if each home were sitting on a piece of pie, and every year Mother Nature carves out another bite with her fork. Mickey’s crew can miraculously move an entire house back, one hundred feet, four hundred feet, but eventually the owner will run out of frontage. The front door will be at the road. There’ll be nothing left but crust, and Mother Nature will still be hungry.

Mickey’s now transplanting a seven-bedroom monstrosity on Baxter Road, but this one’s different. The owners recently bought the house directly across the street. Mickey’s crew razed it, and now they’re moving the cliff house to the other side of Baxter, to an entirely new piece of pie. Only on Nantucket.

“Crazy, huh? Mickey says if he lives long enough, he’ll move that house again,” says Jill.

“This is why I live mid-island,” says Petra, who lives mid-island
because that’s where she grew up and because she can’t afford to live closer to the ocean.

It’s a good story, but Beth is now busy testing out the believability of different exit strategies in her head and can barely keep her butt on the couch.
I forgot my book. Gracie’s not feeling well. I’m not feeling well.

Petra, who is sitting next to Beth and somehow senses her approaching flight, reaches over and discreetly slides Beth’s hand between their laps. She squeezes it, firmly but not too hard, offering both comfort and an anchor.
I love you, and you’re not going anywhere.

They hear a perfunctory knock at the door, and then Courtney and Georgia enter at the same time, a study in contrasts. Courtney’s round, makeup-less face is flushed pink, her hair is loosely gathered into a ponytail high on her head, her hairline is wet with sweat. She’s wearing a lavender tank top under an unzipped thrift-shop winter coat, black cotton yoga pants, and flip-flops. She has her book in hand. Bright and smiling, she takes a seat on the couch on the other side of Beth, her energy floating into the room along with her, landing softly, like an airy, white dandelion puff blown in on a gentle breeze. She smells of patchouli.

Georgia, on the other hand, is hurried and harried, wearing smoky evening eye shadow, lipstick, and bold, dangling gold earrings, clomping in on her black business heels, struggling against the weight of the stuffed leather laptop bag on her shoulder, cursing the latest bridezilla who kept her on the phone for forty-five minutes agonizing over aisle runner choices, peeling off hat and gloves and scarf and coat as she apologizes for being late. If Courtney is a wispy seed sailing in on a warm breeze, Georgia is a tree limb snapped by a hurricane wind, crashing to the earth. It’s hard to imagine from the sight of them that Courtney and Georgia are best friends, but they are.

Relieved and now called to action, Jill excuses herself and runs into her kitchen. Before Georgia can sit down, Jill returns, claps her hands twice like a schoolteacher demanding her class’s attention, and ushers the group into her dining room. Georgia is the first to gasp, then they all do. Jill beams, delighting in all the oohs and aahs, gratified to have elicited the exact reaction she’d imagined.

The book this month takes place in post–World War II Japan, and clearly Jill was inspired by this setting. An origami animal sits on the center of each plate—a purple crane, a white swan, an orange tiger, a green turtle, a gray elephant. A gob of green wasabi and a neat pile of fleshy, pink ginger are placed to the right of each paper animal, and each plate is flanked by a pair of chopsticks and a tiny bowl filled with soy sauce. White tea lights are scattered around the room, and two bottles of sake are on the table. California, salmon, and tuna rolls are displayed on an oval platter at the center of it all.

“Wow, Jill. Tell me you didn’t roll these yourself,” says Courtney.

“Of course she did,” says Georgia.

“I did,” admits Jill.

“And did you make these, too?” asks Courtney, holding up a purple paper crane.

“It wasn’t hard. They have simple directions on the Internet,” says Jill.

“It wasn’t hard for you. You’re amazing,” says Courtney. “You must’ve been preparing all day.”

“It didn’t take that long,” says Jill, taking great pleasure in all the fuss.

“You could do this for a living,” says Beth.

Jill’s been a stay-at-home mom for sixteen years, and she certainly doesn’t need to work as long as Mickey keeps moving houses, but it’s not a bad idea. She could hire herself out to the
wealthy summer residents, hosting lavish book club parties. They’d love her.

“Okay, now everyone choose a seat. Each place card has the name of one of the characters, so you’ll—”

“We’re not talking about the book tonight,” says Petra.

Beth’s stomach tightens. She wishes she could at least down a glass of sake before they dive into this.

“What?” Jill smiles nervously. “Of course we are.”

“No, we’re not,” says Petra.

Petra is five years younger than the youngest of them, but she’s without question the alpha male of the group. The oldest of seven children, daughter of Polish immigrants, and owner of Dish, one of Nantucket’s most beloved restaurants, Petra is tough and bossy and will say with a shameless, crooked smile that she comes by it naturally. But she’s also fair-minded, and there’s not a nasty bone in her tall body. If anyone can derail Jill’s book club extravaganza without tears or a friendship-ending argument, it’s Petra.

“And we need something stronger than sake. You have any vodka?” asks Petra.

“But that’s not Japanese,” says Jill, still trying to resist the suggestion of deviating in any way from the book’s theme.

“Jimmy’s cheating on Beth with the hostess at Salt, and he moved out,” says Petra.

Again, Georgia is the first to gasp. Jill turns to Beth and absorbs the fear and apology in Beth’s eyes. Without another word about Japan, she walks into her kitchen and returns to the table with a bottle of Triple Eight vodka in one hand and a bottle of Ocean Spray cranberry juice in the other.

“Will this do?” she asks as she sits down.

“Perfect,” says Petra, and she begins pouring vodka into wineglasses, leaving little room for juice. “Show them the card.”

Beth pulls the card and envelope out from her book and obediently passes them to Georgia.